Dawlat Yassin

           Dr. Aziz Before and After The Marabar Caves Incident

Dr. Aziz is the main Indian character o E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India. He is a successful medical doctor and a poet. The first conversation we encounter in the novel is a discussion of the possibility to befriend an Englishman, and then the whole action follows as an answer to this question. This very question of Indian- English relationships is treated through Dr. Aziz’s development from a tolerant person to a rigid enemy to everything that is English. Dr. Aziz’s character and personality goes through a drastic change that separates his life into two clear cut stages, the one before the Marabar Caves charges and his subsequent imprisonment, and the other stage following his release from prison. This change will affect his relations to the English, to his countrymen and to the world. Dr. Aziz also undergoes a change in the way he expresses his ideas as an educated and talented man. He moved from the oral tradition of reciting poetry into the active role of writing and publishing it.

.

From the very beginning of the novel, Dr. Aziz is shown as a tolerant loving person. The moment he meets Mrs. Moore, he is ready to trust her and love her. Her being English does not make him refrain giving his whole heart to the old woman whom he believes to be kind and good hearted. At this stage, he has nothing against the English just because they are the colonizers of his country, rather his relation to them depends on the way they treat him. He has no concerns to the public affairs of his country, nor has he any nationalistic feelings. However, he is seized by depression at the sight of “the roads, named after victorious generals…were symbolic of the net Great Britain have thrown over India”. This depression is the latent seed of nationalism within this educated man. It is a weakness within Dr. Aziz that he needs some personal incident like the Marabar caves’ to evoke his national feelings and brings them into maturity.  Even before his lapse into a mature awareness of the ugly reality of British colonialism of his country, Dr. Aziz is always eager to “escape the net and be back where among the manners and gestures that he knew” and to shake the dust of Anglo-India off his feet”. This idea is manifested at the end of the novel.  He, not only shakes off the “dust of Anglo India,” but he sheds off everything that is English, even his friends.

            Dr. Aziz is also portrayed as a typical oriental in his exaggerated hospitability and reliance on emotions. He identifies with emotional Westerners and loves them. Upon knowing that Mrs. Moore, and later on Ralph Moore, rely on their feelings in their relationships with people, he stamps each them with “then you are an oriental”. They are “potentially harmonious” (Maclean 27). Unlike Mrs. Moore and her son, Mr. Fielding “proceeds basically in terms of logic and intellect”(Maclean 26). This very characteristic of Fielding sets him apart from Aziz. Thus, the difference in personalities between Fielding and Aziz  becomes  “largely responsible for misunderstandings”.(Maclean 26). Again harmony is brought through the presence of Ralph Moore who can tickle Aziz’s tender feelings of friendship towards himself and his dead mother. Aziz takes Ralph to the lake and there:

in the midst of wind and rain, the confusion of crowds, the trumpeting of elephants, the sounding of artillery, thunder and lightening, upset, dumping them ignominiously into the tank ‘that was the climax’, Forster observes ‘as far as India admits one’…Fielding and Aziz, British and Indian, are brought together (though not completely unite) under the influence of the Hindu Way of Love. (Allen 139)

Maclean agrees that the friendship between Aziz and Fielding “is limited by their personalities”(Maclean 33), but finally declares that they have “been drawn , not by any individual or personality, into the inclusive harmony, and are accepted  in the union of Infinite Love”(Maclean32). Despite the final union between, Aziz and Fielding, their relation is doomed to be cut short, not on personal and human terms, but on big national issues. If their friendship is to be maintained, it needs to be equal; a condition that can never be fulfilled while one’s country is colonized and exploited by the other’s. This very issue surpasses all love and religion in its effects on human relations or at least in the British- Indian relations embodied by Aziz and Fielding.

Before the Marabar Caves incident, Dr. Aziz’s preferred themes are the decay of Islam and the brevity of love.  In this stage, he is connected to the oral tradition of reciting poetry.  “By associating Aziz with the poerty [the writer] automatically puts him in opposition to writing and all the more so with the stress of hearing ‘words, words’ ” (Jackson 4). Jackson believes that “the technology of writing has been instrumental in bringing about certain forms of interiority, individuality and privacy” (Jackson4).These privileges are not given to Dr.Aziz  till after his release from prison. In the later stage, Aziz is shown not only writing poetry, but also changing his topic preferences. He moved from concentrating on the themes of the decay of Islam and brevity of love, to focus on the topics of Indian nationalism and casting off Indian woman’s veil (women’s Hijab). Now Dr. Aziz is aware of the meaning of Indian nationalism that has the power to unify all Indian religious sects against the foreign forces occupying their country. He gets attracted towards Indian Hindus and detached from the English.

On the other hand, it is not a mere coincidence that Dr. Aziz as poet and a writer in this stage starts to share topics with the wider Islamic world to which he belongs in some way or another. The argument against and with the veil has started in Egypt as early as1899 with Kassim Amin’s book Tahrir el Mara’a (Liberation of Woman). Woman’s liberation movement peaked when a group of  Egyptian women created an independent feminist group called The Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU) and received an invitation from the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal rights (IAW) to attend its conference in Rome where they made their first public declaration of their program. EFU agenda  mainly included family laws and concentrated on education for girls. While some argues that unveiling was never part of the formal agenda of the EFU, Sha'arawi,( a main founder of the group) is one of the first women to declare her denunciation of the veil and to take it off in a theatrical dramatic act in 1923 upon her return from the (IAW) conference in Rome. Forster was aware of the political and cultural situation in the East at the time he was writing his novel. He successfully connects his character, Dr. Aziz, to the Islamic world through the issue of women’s veil which was a hot topic at that time in Muslim and Arab countries.

At the end of the novel, Dr. Aziz can and does engineer his relations in a mature way. He is aware of his position in the world. As an Indian, his main alliance is meant to be with his countrymen disregarding of their religious sects, and as member of a colonized country he can never form healthy friendships with members of the colonizer country. He is also a Moslem who must share topics and debates that flourishes in the Islamic world. Above all this, “he  reveal[s] both the need and desire to identify himself with a mother land,...[he] of course continues to love Islam but he gains insight into its equivocal role in India” (Parry159-60). Finally, he parted from the traditional way of reciting poetry and enters a modern era of writing it. He writes for the unity of Indians with all their religious sects and advocates the unveiling of Indian woman regardless of her religion.

                                                        Works Cited

Allen, Glen O. “Structure, Symbol And Theme in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India”. Perspectives on E. M. Forter’s A Pasage to India. Ed. V. A. Shahnan. New York: Barnes &Noble, Inc, 1968. 121-41.

Jackson, Tony E. “The De-composition of Writing in A Passage to India”. Journal of Modern Literature. 29.3 Spring 2006:1-18.

http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=21722618&site=ehost-live

Maclean,Hugh. “The Structure of A Passage to India”. Perspectives on E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India.  Ed. V. A. Shahnan. New York: Barnes &Noble, Inc, 1968. 19-33.

Parry, Benita. “Passage to More than India”. Perspectives on E. M. Forter’s A Pasage to India. Ed. V. A. Shahnan. New York: Barnes &Noble, Inc, 1968.151-65.